Michael Angarano Takes 'This Is Us' Into New Territory

Since the first mention of Nick Pearson, This Is Us fans knew to brace themselves. The little brother to the show's late but still ever-present patriarch, Jack, had himself died in the Vietnam War, and cast another shadow over Jack's children as they grappled with where they came from and how to carry the legacy of their super-dad. But as viewers know, the time-jumping nature of the show ensures that no character is ever really dead—they return in flashbacks and flash forwards, adding new emotional tangles to the story's many threads.

But it wasn't until the last episode of 2018 that the show revealed Nicky was actually never really dead, period, and had somehow returned from the war—just not back to his family, opening up new avenues to explore and giving fans more reasons to anticipate the show's signature tear-jerking twists.

Michael Angarano, who plays Nicky—the Clark Kent to his brother's Superman, with a sensitive bearing that stood in contrast to Jack's stoicism—has since learned what This Is Us fans have known for three seasons: The show is full of surprises, even when you think you know what's coming. Here, he talks about how the show aimed to tackle its depiction of the Vietnam War authentically, how he found out about Nicky's fate, and life after This Is Us.

Kathryn Wirsing

How did you come to play Nick Pearson?

My agent called me, and I had no idea what was going on—I didn't even know I was being considered. He said, "So, I have something," and I could tell that he was very excited. There was an emotional quality to his voice that he doesn't usually have. It was quivering a little bit as he described to me the character and the arc. So I got on the phone with one of the producers that day, and I was blown away by how ambitious the storyline was. It was huge in scope. I was familiar with the show but I didn't know exactly how they were going to pull this off, to portray the Vietnam War authentically, without filtering the horror of it down for a commercial audience.

What convinced you that the show could do the character and story justice in a way you'd want to sign on for?

One of the things that Isaac [Aptaker], a producer on the show, told me was that they had consulted with [novelist] Tim O'Brien, who wrote [the book of short stories] The Things They Carried, one of the seminal books about the Vietnam War. Tim O'Brien consulted with the writers' room and helped carve out this storyline and this character. I read The Things They Carried, and continued to read his other books, and then I got the first script—and it said "Co-written by Dan Fogelman and Tim O'Brien." I thought, Wow! They really went for it.

The scene where Nicky is drafted is a big turning point for his character and for the arc of the show. How did you construct that scene in a way that captured the true anxiety of the event?

It's still hard now, with as much crazy shit happening in this country, to imagine a draft in which you or your brother, or your cousin, or your best friend would have to get drafted into a war they didn't want to be a part of. So for me, the draft lottery scene was really important. And Ken Olin, the director of that episode, kept telling Milo and I not to play the sentimentality of those scenes. Don't try to sell your connection as brothers to the audience. We know that you're brothers, we know what's at stake.

Ron Batzdorff/NBC

Because of the time-hopping aspect of the show, you play Nicky over very different stages of life. How did you calibrate his character before the draft and after the war?

The Nicky before the draft really stood out when I read him on the page. He's very different from Jack, who's super earnest and very present, but who swallows down a lot of stuff, which allows him to be the sort of the mythical heroic father figure that he is to his kids. But Nicky, from the first scene, really wore his emotions on his sleeve. He expresses his thoughts, his way of seeing the world; you see how he's trying to understand his destiny, taking this very existential approach going into war. Then he's there and you could only imagine what any war, but especially that war, would do to somebody who has such a delicate way in which they think about life.

The Nicky after the draft, who has been now at war for a year, who has seen the things he has—there's no research you could really do as an actor that can do it justice. You just haven't lived it. I don't presume to think I could place myself in somebody like Nicky's shoes. He's seen things that we will never see, on a daily basis. But I can imagine that it would break that clarity of mind that he had in the beginning. To me, I envision him in an almost constant haze.

"You could only imagine what that war would do to somebody

who has such a delicate way in which they think about life."

Most of your scenes are opposite Milo Ventimiglia. Did you have much interaction with the rest of the cast on set?

We overlapped in terms of working on the same day. It's funny because until we did, it felt like I was in an Oliver Stone Vietnam movie starring Milo Ventimiglia. Then I'd see Sterling [K. Brown] walking around base camp, and I'd be like, Oh my gosh! I'm on This Is Us!

By now you're well acquainted with the emotional wallop the show constantly serves up to viewers. How have you responded to it?

Well, first, I think it speaks to how good the writing is on the show, and the care that the actors and directors put into these stories. You know they come from real places, because they grab you in a very real way that's rare. I've seen my father cry a handful of times in my life. I watched the show with my father, and during that scene in the pilot with the doctor, my dad is crying hysterically with me.

When Jack told the parents of a soldier from his platoon that his biggest regret from the war was their son's death in an ambush, it seemed to signal that Jack hadn't let Nicky die. Did you know when you signed on to play Nick Pearson that he didn't die in the war, or did you have to read the signs too?

In that first conversation with Isaac [Aptaker], he told me that Nicky was going to be alive. And just so you know, I’m a terrible liar, or at least I thought I was, so it was very difficult to not tell the people closest to me what I already knew. And it was slightly scary speaking with journalists who were trying to get secrets out of me because I felt like I could slip up at any second. Your instinct was right, because if you go back and watch, the show's writers are always very particular about how they speak about Nicky’s death.

Kathryn Wirsing

You wrote, directed, and star in an indie, Avenues, that comes out on March 12. It follows two friends who meet two women at their favorite restaurant in New York and go on to spend a winter's day wandering, bar-hopping, and peeling open their lives to one another. It's your first writing, directing, and producing credit—where did the story come from?

I wrote the very first draft of Avenues ten years ago, when I was 21 years old. I wrote it in five days as a form of creative therapy, and would continue to rewrite it over the next five years. It was something that I started to write with no expectation of what the finished product would be. In the year before writing Avenues, for the first time in my entire acting career, I involuntarily didn’t work due to the writer’s strike. So writing became what I did to occupy my time, and to assert some control over my life. In retrospect, I’m really grateful for the accidental year off from acting because it allowed me to focus on writing, which I’ve done my entire life, just not in any disciplined way.

The idea came from a day I had on a December day in New York City, where me and a bunch of friends got caught in a blizzard. We went ice skating in Central Park and when it started to snow, we retreated into the Plaza Hotel to have cocktails, only to find a foot and a half of snow on the ground when we went back outside. The entire city was shut down, and as we made our way downtown to where we were staying, the rest of the night became a J.D. Salinger short story. The blizzard element was taken out of the script the moment I found out fake snow is illegal to use in Manhattan. Hopefully, you still get the picture.

The characters have a lot of debates, and express very distinct existential opinions about life and relationships. Did those come from you, or did the actors pitch in to crystallize those conversations?

The most encouraging part of making the movie was to have written something so personal to me and have other people relate it to it in any way. The actors all had great insight, so much so that they helped me understand it better. If there was a thought or a piece of dialogue that needed to be said differently or more clearly, they were often the ones to point it out to me, as opposed to the other way around.

Ironically, [Avenues actor] Nick Braun was the first person who I ever read the script out loud with, years before we started shooting. He was very familiar with the story, and the two of us sat down before we were going to make it and rewrote some of the scenes together. We improvised a lot of the dialogue between [our characters] Peter and Max, and then I put it into the production draft of the script. We had limited rehearsals and no time for improvising on set, but at the very least all of us knew the characters we were playing and the story we were trying to tell.

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